Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea by Jules Vernepage 2 of 414 (00%)

and the peculiar life with which it seemed endowed. If it was a whale,it surpassed in size all those hitherto classified in science.Taking into consideration the mean of observations made at divers times--rejecting the timid estimate of those who assigned to this objecta length of two hundred feet, equally with the exaggerated opinionswhich set it down as a mile in width and three in length--we might fairlyconclude that this mysterious being surpassed greatly all dimensionsadmitted by the learned ones of the day, if it existed at all.And that it DID exist was an undeniable fact; and, with that tendencywhich disposes the human mind in favour of the marvellous, we can understandthe excitement produced in the entire world by this supernatural apparition.As to classing it in the list of fables, the idea was out of the question.

On the 20th of July, 1866, the steamer Governor Higginson,of the Calcutta and Burnach Steam Navigation Company, had metthis moving mass five miles off the east coast of Australia.Captain Baker thought at first that he was in the presence of anunknown sandbank; he even prepared to determine its exact positionwhen two columns of water, projected by the mysterious object,shot with a hissing noise a hundred and fifty feet up into the air.Now, unless the sandbank had been submitted to the intermittenteruption of a geyser, the Governor Higginson had to do neithermore nor less than with an aquatic mammal, unknown till then,which threw up from its blow-holes columns of water mixed withair and vapour.

Similar facts were observed on the 23rd of July in the same year,in the Pacific Ocean, by the Columbus, of the West Indiaand Pacific Steam Navigation Company. But this extraordinarycreature could transport itself from one place to another